The social network for trade unionists - a LabourStart project.
Democracy v. Plutocracy
Here’s how those of us from poverty who have been poor all long have experienced life (including shabby treatment from the middle class) and how we’ve seen things these past 30 years since the Reagan Revolution began in 1980.
One of the most common memes thrown in our faces since then has been and still is “Have you ever been employed by someone who is poor?” (i.e. it’s the rich who create the jobs)
The rich do not create jobs. They create profit and wealth for themselves by eliminating jobs, slashing/suppressing wages and benefits. This is referred to as “cutting costs” or “increasing the bottom line” (which benefits CEO’s and increased portfolio appreciation and dividend payouts for those able to afford to invest in equities through 401(k)’s and the like).
And as a matter of fact, the poor do create jobs and other forms of profit/income generation for the middle and upper classes who don’t even have to break a sweat for it.
The poor are deprived of access to living wage jobs in a jobs market in which there never, never, never were enough living wage jobs to go around for everyone in need of a job and who wanted one. The poor are denied access to living wage jobs with health benefits through credentialism (established by the owning class with collaboration from the middle class) while being denied access to the education and training they need to be employable at living wage jobs.
Employers use the credit report and FICO score and work history gaps to deny the poor jobs (even menial, poverty wage Wal-Mart jobs). This ensured that the middle class got all the jobs in our depleted jobs pool (which had been shrinking since
1980) while the poor — the underclass from the trailer parks and ghettos — got 100% economically excluded (with poor women being at the very bottom of every pile); and then demonized for our “lack of work ethic” — making us “undeserving” of even any paltry inadequate welfare benefits for being such jobless “losers” and “lazy
bums.”
Meanwhile, middle class state employees — the bureaucrats at unemployment offices across the US — told socio-economically disadvantaged job applicants in the most dire need of living wage jobs that “no one owes you a job” and have outright refused to even give us a job application for one of those union jobs as an $18/hr meter reader for the local utility companies.
The poor also provide middle class bureaucrats with comfortable office jobs as welfare caseworkers, children & youth social workers, detention center counselors, non-profit charity administrators, prison staff, and the list goes on.
The middle class enjoy civil service jobs with benefits and job protection in all areas of employment centered on managing the poor — whom they despise, even though they’re getting their nice, secure, stable paychecks off the backs of the very people they look down on with scorn and deride with contempt as children of a lesser god in need of punishment for the status crime of living while poor in AmeriKKKa. It's as if we somehow owe them a debt for being born into their world.
The poor overwhelmingly comprise the US prison population. Prisons are the largest “subsidized housing” program in the country that provides local, state, and federal middle class jobs in running the prison-industrial complex. The rich benefit the most from this via the civilian inmate labor program (AR-210-35) which is inmate slave labor — paid 22 – 47 cents an hour for making Victoria Secret lingerie, computer motherboards, and even data entry work and taking telephone reservations — all with no workers’ comp, no federal minimum wage, no social security withholding, no unemployment insurance, and no pesky unions or workers’ rights agitators.
The middle and upper classes are also subsidized by the poor by the Welfare Reform Act (which imposed a five year lifetime cap on welfare benefits) through its component known as Workfare in which the government subsidizes corporations for any Workfare labor. It’s a no rights, no minimum wage involuntary workforce of mostly desperately poor women that provides this cheap labor. Workfare employers pay only a fraction of the paltry federal minimum wage for each worker that is a poor welfare recipient on TANF. The rich get richer off of subsidized slave labor and the middle class benefits from cheap goods and better paying supervisory/managerial jobs overseeing the poor Workfare workers.
Oddly, the ONLY member of the Left who recognized that childbirth and raising children was actually work was Noam Chomsky.
The poor who are disabled who are the lucky ones that weren’t denied disability benefits — those who are struggling to survive on $600/mo SSI, which isn’t enough to live on anywhere in the US — also provide hefty subsidies for the rich through exploitative “special minimum wage waivers.” These are “workshops” that do the jobs subcontracted from some of our biggest corporations and the jobs are mostly assembly line or piece work. Any disabled person who ends up in one of these workshop jobs can be paid as little as $1.50/hr. Technically, the wages are supposed to reflect the actual rate or prevailing wage a non-disabled worker doing the same job would be paid. But in reality, the employer gets to decide whatever wage he wishes to pay.
The formula used by the government by which these slave wages reduce a disabled worker’s monthly SSI/SSDI benefit is such that if the disabled person’s job (paycheck) stops abruptly, there wouldn’t be enough left in SSI/SSDI benefits alone to even cover rent for a place to live. After a disabled worker’s employment ends at one of these “workshops”, it takes up to 6 months before their full SSI/SSDI
benefits are restored — which very effectively keeps the disabled trapped in slave wage jobs programs.
America’s poor today have higher disability rates, lower life expectancy rates and higher maternal and infant mortality rates than people in many Third World countries due to a real lack of access to health care and any real safety net. Compounding the problem is that access to abortion and reliable contraception for poor women has
dwindled greatly over the last 15 years, even though a destitute woman on welfare gets no prenatal care, no dental care (which is critical because the fetus harnesses all the woman’s organ systems and drains her body of calcium which leads to bone
and tooth loss) , or additional help from welfare for a baby born while she’s already receiving paltry TANF benefits that don't even cover the cost of housing.
But the working class and the poor (you know, us “stray animals that will only breed if fed”) aren’t reproducing a large enough reserve army of surplus labor and aren’t dying off fast enough to suit capitalism’s “winners.” And there are fewer and fewer “winners” and more and more “losers” in this No Pea shell game in our Serengeti
economy than at any other point in American history since the Great Depression officially began 81 years ago.
The needs of the poor and working class are always disregarded, ignored, and shoved aside while political candidates fawn over the middle class. The middle class has gotten (and still gets) all the attention paid to their grievances while the poor get nothing except told to “shut up and stop whining.”
Time after time these last 30+ years, the poor have been made to “take one for the team” by both political parties with the full blessing and support of the middle class.
Every time there’s sacrifices and compromises to be made, it’s always the poor who get offered up as the sacrificial lamb on the altar of capitalism with lots of hand-wringing and excuses by “progressives” and their organizations of “We’re sorry, but we had to compromise your needs otherwise we would have gotten nothing to address ours. Sorry if some people have to be left out, but if you wait your
turn while we get our agenda met first, we can eventually negotiate for your needs next time.”
But there never is a “next time” and our turn never comes.
It’s extremely offensive and classist that the concept of “Joe the Plumber” and “Main Street” is used to insulate the middle class from the suffering of those who are far worse off. We always hear the battle cries of “Why is the government destroying the middle class?” and “The middle class is under attack!” and variations thereof —
implying that “destroying the poor is perfectly OK, but threatening the middle class is going too far.”
The political elite, who are elected by middle class voters, aspire to be part of the owning class — the very same class that view the needs of the common people as an economic nuisance. (Note that the word “entitlement” is used as a derogatory weapon that is never applied to FEMA’s black budget or the Pentagon budget.)
Tax breaks essentially pay corporations to ship jobs out of America to the lowest and sleaziest bidder to places like Indonesia and El Salvador where workers are paid 15 cents an hour; lowering the tax base and stressing the social safety net (what’s left of it) and adding to the deficit. Meanwhile, the poorest of the poor
jobless whose only income is food stamps — about six million of the long-term unemployed — have had their food stamps taken away from them with cuts to the program in order to pay for an unemployment benefit extension for middle class unemployed people who are eligible for benefits.
Those in the most need of a chance for a job and an economic lifeline are going to be starved to death to pay for a benefit for only SOME unemployed people, mainly those who are middle class.
There’s a double standard: the Golden Parachute for the rich and their whores in Congress, the Oval Office, and the US Supreme Court near the top of the economic ladder, and the Lead Anchor standard for the 98% on the lower and bottom rungs.
So why is it OK for the poor to be crushed underfoot, suffering in misery and deprivation with higher disability rates, maternal and infant mortality rates, and lower life expectancies — all due to lack of access to medical care and other basic human needs — than people in many Third World nations while only the grievances of the middle class matter?
If it’s not acceptable to destroy the middle class, then it’s not acceptable to destroy the poor.
If it’s not OK for middle class women and girls to be forced to work in the seedy sex industry under exploitative, dehumanizing and degrading conditions with no social security credits and other benefits due to job discrimination and lack of equal opportunity for jobs with dignity, why should it be OK for poor women and girls? If it’s not OK for your wives and daughters, it’s not OK for us.
If it’s not OK for middle class boys and men to fight in imperialist wars (that only serve the interests of the very rich) only to get blown up, maimed, and killed; then it’s not OK for our men either.
For over 30 years that fascist right-wing politicians (whose generous salaries, perks, travel expenses, Cadillac health care, and $90,000/yr retirement benefits are paid for by the public) worked to dismantle laws and social programs and safety nets that benefited the working class and the poor; the poor were promised a share of the pie if only we’d quietly wait our turn, hats in hand, after Reagan’s trickle-down economics first benefited the rich and the middle class.
But we never got our turn.
During every debate and discourse on universal health care, provisions in health care reform bills that would have helped the poor were jettisoned in the name of “compromise.” Those of us in poverty never got our turn after the middle class got what they wanted. We’re fed up and we’re through being polite because we can’t wait anymore. And we won’t. We’re sick and tired of being appointed to “take one for the team.”
(And no, we will not “shut up and stop whining”, thank you very much.)
We stand on the precipice of irreversible catastrophe to humanity. We have an over privileged overclass of economic terrorists on Wall Street pulling the strings of their stooges in Congress and in the presidential cabinet like Steny Hoyer (D-MD) who wants to cut social security and his partner in crime, the head of the Catfood Commission, Al Simpson, who called the social security program a “milk cow with 310 million tits.”
Of course, both of those scumbags (along with every other Congresscritter), enjoy the high life off of the public tit. I don’t know about you, but my tits are starting to hurt. Maybe it’s time we pry our greedy arrogant lawmakers’ mouths off of our tits and let them go try and make a living selling overpriced detergent for Amway.
This is about social class justice and human rights. Do you stand on the side of human rights and dignity for ALL, or do you stand on the side of maintaining the same broken system of unearned privileges that brought us to this point in the first place in order to hopefully win some token scraps from the filthy rich just so you can
preserve what’s left of your middle class privilege? The choice is yours. Be the change!
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Tags: classism, discrimination, equality, jobless, jobs, opportunity, poverty, unemployed, welfare
Views: 34
Replies to This Discussion
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Permalink Reply by Peter HJ on -
Hi Jacqueline. Thanks for those thoughts. Like a lot of outside observers, I'm puzzled by the way people in the USA (except you) use the word class. The whole Democrat campaign seemed to be about saving or restoring (or whatever) the middle class. The expression 'working class' seems to be alien or forbidden. A scan of union websites confirms this. Is this a result of the Cold War, do you think? More importantly, what do you think needs to be done, in concrete terms, for the working class to be seen to exist (even by itself), and to 'become the change'? What happens AFTER you stand up to be counted?
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Permalink Reply by Jacqueline S. Homan on -
What happens AFTER we're counted? We make real change — all of us together!
To answer your other question: No, I think it is because most unions were co-opted by the capitalists. Therefore, unions previously never gave a damn about the injustices of job discrimination against women and minorities, on top of a real lack of enough jobs for ALL Americans to begin with (we never had 100% full employment at a living wage), and that thwarted a restructuring of our production and economy based on social need and human rights rather than corporate greed. Unions have for too long operated within the capitalist paradigm, which is part of the problem. We need a total restructuring and a paradigm shift away from capitalism and any of its variants (feudalism, fascism, colonialism, imperialism, etc.)
And that restructuring is precisely what we need to do in order to stop the human rights violations against the poor and working class right here on American soil.
We need to cut the Pentagon budget by 70% and end imperialist warfare.
We need to compel the banksters and the economic terrorist class on Wall Street to repay the collective wealth they've expropriated.
We need to make health care, safe nutritious food, and adequate housing a human right.
We need to nationalize our banking system, our health care system, and our energy sector.
We need to cut welfare handouts to Big Ag, Big Pharma, and other too big to fail global enterprises and every civilized nation needs to nationalize such resources so that we no longer have an environment in the global theater that is safe for the "seven sisters" oil cartel to employ murder, torture and conscripted slave labor [RE; Doe v. Unocal] in other countries that they go into and plunder at will.
Before the silent overthrow of the Soviet Communist system in the East Bloc nations and Russia, the capitalist class had to somewhat mollify SOME workers just enough to keep their position of unearned privilege, their wealth and basically everything from the neck up (Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette ring a bell?)
But now in the post-Communist era, there is nothing to restrain the rapacious greed of the capitalists.
We need to support and help the poor and vulnerable and include them because the working class and poor far, far outnumber the middle and upper classes that largely support an untenable status quo resulting in America's poor living in Third World conditions and those who are only slightly better off are dangerously on the razor's edge. We need to create an economy and a society that works for everybody. But we can't do it under the capitalist model.
It is our sheer numbers that give us strength and we need all the strength we can muster because of the power and wealth of the owning class that we're up against. So the voices of the poor and working class must be included and be made very visible and very vocal and included through a pooling of resources because we ALL must be able to present a formidable uniform front to fight for real democracy and human rights. Support authors, writers and artists who are struggling in poverty and whose works are about the working class in calling for support for the working class.
I would strongly suggest that you pick up a copy and read Classism For Dimwits. That should be every American's manifesto and it would also benefit our comrades across the globe as well.
Capitalism will always lead us to what we have now, which is presently a miserable failure for everyone — except the "winners." Capitalism is a zero-sum game. And what we have now is extreme capitalism: an n-person zero-sum game without a Shapley variable.
To 'save capitalism' is to essentially permit the continuance of the social and economic injustices inherent in the imbalance of power and the exploitative nature that capitalism requires by its very definition as an architecture of aggression.
Peter Hall-Jones said:Hi Jacqueline. Thanks for those thoughts. Like a lot of outside observers, I'm puzzled by the way people in the USA (except you) use the word class. The whole Democrat campaign seemed to be about saving or restoring (or whatever) the middle class. The expression 'working class' seems to be alien or forbidden. A scan of union websites confirms this. Is this a result of the Cold War, do you think? More importantly, what do you think needs to be done, in concrete terms, for the working class to be seen to exist (even by itself), and to 'become the change'? What happens AFTER you stand up to be counted? -
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Permalink Reply by George Koletsis on -
Dear Jacqueline, thank you for sharing your thoughts and ideas, this video is very inspiring to see that some people out there are still talking about class issues, most people i come into contact with these days look at you with sparkling eyes and smile when you mention class! thank you for your great contribution, and i totally endorse Peter's comments.
George Koletsis -
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Permalink Reply by Jacqueline S. Homan on
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That doesn't surprise me, George. Classism is the "invisible" elephant in the living room everyone pretends not to see. For the past 30 years in the US Democrat "pragmatism" has done nothing but accelerate the neoliberal global capitalist jihad against the working classes (including the poor who are either pregnant, elderly, disabled, or otherwise being involuntarily excluded from living wage jobs).
This same political party in the US is content to continue allowing women to remain the one subgroup of human beings and citizens that can be de facto enslaved by backdoor prohibitions against Roe v. Wade that essentially conscript poor women into compulsory childbirth chattel slavery — without ANY compensation for our ruined bodies, diminished health, maimed genital tracts, prolapsed pelvic organs, and without even any income guarantee, universal health care, or any real safety net for the poor (in the US, 84% of those living in deep poverty are women).
Not only is it reproductive slavery for poor women being forced to endure pregnancies and childbirth against our will in the US, it is also a forced procurement of a permanent desperately poor underclass that the rich then use as a poster child to scare obedience and acquiescence from the luckily employed higher-paid unionized working class and others in the middle class.
And then this same party, the Democrats, want our vote? Not only do they want it, they've just scolded us like errant children for being disenchanted!
Making apologia for the party that has continually voted to keep women as a class that is deemed sub-human, less deserving of liberty and human rights and civil rights than a parasitic blastocyst/zygote/fetus — even if that parasitic organism attached to MY body got there as the result of rape or contraceptive failure — while doing nothing to compensate victims of forced pregnancy and childbirth, not even pushing for a real "right to life" income guarantee and safety net for the poor, is not exactly my idea of a party that needs my vote and support. Fuck 'em.
And the petit bourgeoisie feminists have not done a damn thing about it these past 30 years, except to tell their poorer "sisters" to vote Democrat because "the other guys are worse."
I refuse to be "slut-shamed" into voting Democrat, just like I refuse to be slut-shamed for having sex without desiring procreation.
If I, a member of the female half of the human race, and of this nation's citizenry, don't count enough to even be deserving of full equal human and civil rights that men are automatically entitled to as citizens of this country, then I don't count enough for my vote to matter. Without the fundamental human right to bodily autonomy and bodily integrity of sexual/reproductive emancipation, nothing else really matters. My human rights and civil rights are non-negotiable.
George Koletsis said:Dear Jacqueline, thank you for sharing your thoughts and ideas, this video is very inspiring to see that some people out there are still talking about class issues, most people i come into contact with these days look at you with sparkling eyes and smile when you mention class! thank you for your great contribution, and i totally endorse Peter's comments.
George Koletsis -
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Permalink Reply by Blaine Donais on -
Hi Jacqueline:
Thank you for sharing those videos. Your thesis, that class is like race, sex or any other presently "prohibited" grounds for discrimination, makes perfect sense to me. Unfortunately it was specifically ruled out under our Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms. Still that does not detract from the veracity of your point.
I am curious to know, since it is your view that unions have been co-opted, what you think of unionized employees? I ask this because I have a theory of my own on this matter. I believe that unionism in North America has in essence created a new class of employees whom many see as priveleged - that is the unionized employee. This is the only employee left with defined benefits pension plans, pay for overtime work, and rights in the workplace. Other employees (especially in the US it seems) regard unionized employees as privileged and thus the subject of derision.
It always surprises me to see read or hear from non-unionized employees, that unions are just thugs and bullies and only protect themselves - that they have no care for the work or lives of others - that in essence they are acting like a privileged class lording it over the unionized masses. Yet when I go to union functions, it seems the primary desire of many is to improve the lot of unionized employees either through minimum standards legislation or by organizing them. UFCW for example took a run at the Ontario Government over the exclusion of farm workers from the right to unionize. At least in my view, they improved the lot of farm workers immeasurably by doing so.
It is hard to deny that there is a considerable difference between the lives of most unionized employees and those who are not unionized. Does this make unionized employees a privileged class?
I am curious to hear your thoughts on this. -
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Permalink Reply by Jacqueline S. Homan on
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Blaine,
This is my second attempt to post the well-detailed answer to your very valid questions.
What I think and what I have to say to answer your question is a lot of inconvenient truths that those who are comfortably off and securely employed as well-paid union workers don't want to hear.
A lot of union workers who are middle class white males never gave a damn about those of us who are hungry, who are/have been homeless, who lost all our natural teeth before age 35 due to lack of access to medical and dental care, who never got a chance to have anything at all in this country — a nation whose bedrock was rooted in racial and gender inferiority, economic oppression (colonialism), and the exploitation of poor women who are at the bottom of every pile.
They refuse to acknowledge how their unearned privileges (male privilege, white privilege, and class privilege) work against someone like me — a very poor woman from the Underclass. For the most part, union workers are overwhelmingly white middle class men who got into their good jobs by virtue of race privilege, gender privilege, and having an "in" — i.e., knowing the "right" person willing to help them get a union card.
Meanwhile, these same middle class white men railed against Affirmative Action — the only measure that ensured that a meager 2% of all the good-paying union jobs went to women while 10% went to non-whites. Those who automatically got 90% of all the good jobs and opportunities in this country cried victim if those of us on the receiving end of discrimination and exclusion got even just a tiny token crumb.
I find it ironic that those who've benefited unfairly at the expense of poor women and minorities from an entire matrix of unearned privileges and nepotism — the "White Guys' Affirmative Action program" — which ensured that the favored, dominant group got the lions' share of all the good jobs and vocational choices, complained about poor women and minorities getting a miserly inadequate slice of the pie. Given that women comprise over half of the population, it is beyond grossly unfair for us to be begrudged and denied proportional opportunities for the good jobs — especially since we don't get to pay less for the things we need to be able to live than men. And it's not like those white men with the good-paying jobs were lining up to marry and economically support poor women (and our kids) to lift us out of poverty and utter misery and hopelessness.
Instead, they frequently exploited us as sex trophies and told us that we should be "grateful" if they bought us a cheap meal, or put a five dollar bill in our G-string.
Based on my experiences and observations, I've found that an overwhelming number of union workers getting middle class wages are white males with a sense of entitlement — they're the only ones deserving of anything while it's perfectly okay for poor women to starve, be homeless, be without utilities, be without medical and dental care, exploited and abused, cheated out of paltry child support, and then deprived of even the miserly safety net that AFDC once was before that got eliminated by the Welfare Reform Act of 1996.
There isn't much difference between middle class white collar professionals and the overwhelmingly white male blue collar middle class union workers. Both have taken food and other economic needs away from the poor. , 84% whom are women, because both are self-important middle class greeds who only care about themselves and they both identify with the bourgeois. So long as they're comfortable and their own seat is secure within the socio-economic hierarchy of our capitalist system, they could care less and they grow increasingly intellectually lazy. They don't want to know about injustices faced by other people. All is fine in their own little world.
The unemployed union workers getting far more in unemployment benefits than poor women who work two minimum wage jobs with no health benefits got their middle class unemployment benefits extension paid for with cuts and slated future elimination of food stamps for destitute women, children, the disabled, and the low-income elderly. They get to live a nice life, but they cry poverty with two loaves of bread under their arms while we get to suffer and starve — and unlike them, we don't have a lifetime worth of middle class doo-dads bought on middle class union wages to sell on eBay to get money to live until someone maybe feels like giving us chances for jobs so we don't have to go hungry.
Unions, especially the skilled trades and manufacturing unions, are just as responsible as the rich for creating a destitute Underclass by oppressing poor women because they discriminated against us for union memberships and for getting a chance in life for living wage jobs with dignity that didn't entail having to dance naked or trade sexual favors just to get money to eat and a place to live.
They're the ones who helped create all those poor welfare mothers whom they despise — poor women who have been denied equal opportunities for decent paying blue-collar jobs, after being abandoned while pregnant without medical care and then left with children to raise while rarely getting enough money in child support.
They complain about their "hard-earned money" being taxed to support "welfare queens" and "able-bodied SSI cheats."
They voted for racist, sexist and misogynistic Congressmen and US presidents like Reagan, Bush Sr., and the Shrub who won elections by cutting social programs for the poor and dismantling any measures that tried to provide equal opportunities for poor women and minorities. Union workers' votes raised lawmakers and presidents to office who promised them an array of middle class goodies and tax cuts at the expense of the "undeserving" poor. Of course, those same pro-capitalist leaders then turned around and began the assault on organized labor after greasing the skids for organized labor's middle class white male majority to throw those of us at the very bottom — poor women and children on welfare and poor disabled people on SSI — to the sharks in exchange for their "lentil soup."
They sacrificed us because they identified with the bourgeoisie and sided with them out of personal greed and hatred for the poor who have been economically excluded by discrimination and a real lack of enough living wage jobs to go around for everybody who needed a job. So these union workers who had their nice life didn't give a shit about those of us with absolutely nothing, and no chances to ever get anything either.
Their votes for presidents and lawmakers, who made their pile by hurting the poor, brought us 30 years of abusive social and economic policies that are called "Benign Neglect" in polite circles. But make no mistake about it, those policies were not "benign."
Union workers with economic security who comprised part of the economic middle class were no different than the rest of the middle class — everything was all about "ME ME ME." Middle class voters whose votes resulted in this nation's poorest and most downtrodden being thrown under the bus with the elimination of CETA and other social programs that were the poor's only economic lifeline, overwhelmingly supported and cheered the Welfare Reform Act of 1996. This was not the result of a momentary absence of mind.
Good-paying white male dominated union jobs, in addition to all the other good jobs this nation enjoyed during the Clinton administration, largely did not go to poor women being booted off of welfare who faced the "gender penalty" in addition to significant barriers to decent jobs due to classism — the most deeply entrenched but least challenged bigotry in the US.
The overwhelming majority of workers with middle class wages and benefits never wanted poor women to be able to climb out of grueling poverty and join their ranks because they viewed us as competition for "their" jobs. If they hadn't felt this way, the Equal Rights Amendment would have been passed (among other things).
Union organizers, leaders, and membership bodies begrudged us welfare, voted for Congressmen and presidents who cut our throats, while denying us a chance for the good life as union workers. All the rules about joining the unions were set up to favor white middle class males who hadn't been excluded by a legacy of discrimination for training and employment opportunities. Unreasonable prior work experience requirements, heavy lifting requirements for job descriptions where such activities are not a BFOQ, and countless other requirements that had little to do with whether or not someone was qualified for a chance for a job and union membership were contrived to deliberately exclude poor women from opportunities.
Unions, their leaders, members, et al, were part of the middle class problem. The good life erased their memory. The middle class — unionized or not — who were Reagan's electoral foot soldiers begrudged miserly inadequate AFDC benefits for the poor, but demanded that the poor be thrown off the dole and get jobs. The middle class were/are overwhelmingly a bunch of greedy, insecure backstabbers who were only concerned with ensuring their own position was comfortable within the capitalist system — a system in which somebody always has to be at the bottom, in which there has to be "losers" in order for there to be "winners." Typically, the "winners" were men.
The lawmakers and president who passed the Welfare Reform Act of 1996 knew it. So did unions and their members who were part of the "new" middle class.
In a capitalist society where the economic law of supply and demand does not operate in a vacuum, where markets are artificially manipulated by the rich and powerful, there exists a lot of unearned privileges for some members of society at the expense of others. Unions and their individual members don't seek to challenge the unfairness in that reality.
Welfare Reform was a one-sided policy that put a unilateral obligation on the most socio-economically underprivileged to get jobs — any job. But there was no conciliatory gesture by unions to voluntarily welcome and include these poor single moms — or any other poor women for that matter — into the fold and let us join the ranks of middle class union workers. And there was no requirement under the Welfare Reform Act obligating the unions to do so. There was also no requirement for employers to hire poor disadvantaged women who had been on welfare for many years for lack of any appropriate or real equal opportunity for good-paying blue-collar jobs, which rapidly disappeared throughout the 1980's and 1990's.
Middle class gatekeepers in union organizational structures and in employers' human resources departments alike viewed the poor as "the Other" due in no small measure to decades of indoctrination with deficit theory ideology such as the "culture of poverty" school, which blamed the poor for their misfortune for being "morally defective", rather than acknowledge that poverty and inequality of opportunity as the culprit.
Welfare Reform did not include a guaranteed right to a living wage job (or any job at all), but it placed a lifetime benefit limit of five years and drastically slashed benefit amounts. And the unions were silent. Neither their leaders, organizers, nor worker members uttered a peep about that. They had theirs, tough luck for those of us who never got a chance to get ours. For that, they have blood on their hands. All of them.
On the eve of the passing of the Welfare Reform Act of 1996, there were 14 million AFDC recipients comprising 5 million families — almost all who were poor single mothers and children with no other means of economic support and opportunity, and no resources built into their lives. Less than 1% of AFDC recipients were able-bodied men. Eliminating paltry sub-poverty AFDC benefits was defended by comfortably off union workers along with the rest of middle class America as a way of getting "baby makers" and "leeches" off the public dole (which was never enough to live on).
Welfare was never an adequate solution to the problems inflicted on the poor by a patriarchal capitalist society. But eliminating welfare without providing other realistic opportunities and alternatives was a worse solution. Some in the poor people's rights camp have even likened Welfare Reform to the "Final Solution" for the poor because in the US, being poor is often a death sentence just based on the lack of access to medical and dental care alone.
This society has serious issues with classism, and classism has two daughters: sexism and racism. Classism is capitalism's greatest social and economic harm.
Capitalism is based on unearned privileges and entitlement, and as you go up the economic ladder, the attitudes of self-importance and entitlement increase. But we never talk about the culture of capitalism; the culture of greed and getting ahead at all costs that is pervasive among the middle class — including well-paid blue-collar union workers and union organizational leadership, which has a white male face — who think they have a "divine right" to always come first.
We have a culture of capitalism that promotes and maintains classism. We have a capitalist society that touts greed and self-centered entitlement as a virtue. We have an architecture of aggression in which capitalism's biggest losers (poor women) are discarded, labeled as "the Other", devalued, disrespected, and unacknowledged. We're not even seen as being human enough for harm to us to matter. The culture of capitalism is centered on the notion that wealth and unearned privilege (race, gender, and class privilege) is sacrosanct, that only the "fittest" deserve anything and to hell with those of us who have been socially and economically excluded. Unions, their bodies and individual members, are content to operate under the status quo within the culture of capitalism.
This all arose out of the "second purges" in the 1930's and 1940's where unions expelled anyone remotely suspect of Communist politics and socialist leanings from their ranks. Unions made a deal with the devil, and they became indifferent and even hostile to the equally valid needs and claims of others among the ranks of the poor and working classes. Unions sought to protect their own at the expense of many less fortunates, which created divisions among the working class and poor, and left very deep wounds that cannot be readily dismissed with admonitions along the lines of "just get over it and move on."
Blaine Donais said:Hi Jacqueline:
Thank you for sharing those videos. Your thesis, that class is like race, sex or any other presently "prohibited" grounds for discrimination, makes perfect sense to me.
It is hard to deny that there is a considerable difference between the lives of most unionized employees and those who are not unionized. Does this make unionized employees a privileged class?
I am curious to hear your thoughts on this. -
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Permalink Reply by Blaine Donais on
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Thank you for this Jacqueline... you have given me much food for thought.
I have a couple of comments and queries regarding your very thorough and enlightening response.
First, let me explain that I feel very lucky as a Canadian growing up in the 1960's and 1970's. My father died just before I was born leaving my mother to raise seven children. I was the youngest. I recall eating lard sandwiches as a child and rarely having enough to eat. I was part of the socially derided "class" because of our poverty. My mother, with her grade 8 education, found a job as a cook in a hospital. But with so many mouths to feed and kids to take care of there was never enough to go around.
But I definitely had advantages that it appears many poor people in the US did not have. First, I grew up in a post-socialist state (Saskatchewan). Health care was free and we had floride in our water. I still have my own teeth. Also education was free and post secondary education was very cheap. I was able to get student loans and work throughout the school term in university to get a good education.
By the time I got to law school in the very early 1990's, the demographics were quite mixed - over 50% female and a large representation of people of color (mostly First Nations) - higher than the demographics of the city that I went to law school in - Saskatoon.
To be sure there were those who complained about "affirmative action" - but most of the labour leaders I had ever talked to in Canada were fairly progressive. I think you are right though that they do not often represent the views of their own membership on alot of equity issues.
If I get the gist of your point correctly, you are answering my question about perceptions of privilege associated with being unionized by saying that that is because unionized employees do belong to a privileged class.
I can certainly buy that for large numbers of unionized employees I have met. But some of the other assumptions give me a bit more difficulty.
First, the equation of unionization with male privilege: some of Canada's largest unions have a higher percentage of female members than male members. This includes the Teachers unions, Nurses Unions and (I think I have this right) Canada's biggest union the Canadian Union of Public Employees. I can definitely see the connection with male privilege and the manufacturing unions. But these are dwindling rapidly in Canada.
Second, the equation of unionization with white privilege: I am not sure how this plays itself out statistically in many Canadian unions. I do know that unions like HERE (Hotel Employees Restaurant Employees) and UFCW in Canada have a very large component of non-white workers. This does not surprise me given that the service industry is predominantly marginalized and therefore would be overrepresented by marginalized groups.
I am not sure if there is a difference associated with the national distinction (Canada vs US) or if I am just looking at this from rose colored glasses. But I thank you for offering me your viewpoint on this. It gives me much to think about in terms of the roles of unions in our society - the roles they have and the roles they ought to play.
Cheers
Blaine -
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Permalink Reply by Blaine Donais on
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There were witch hunts, but I dont think to the degree you had them in the US. And I am not saying everything is great here either. There is both subtle and intense racism, sexism, and classism in this country. But I do get the sense that there is somewhat of a difference - perhaps a dwindling difference.
The figure you quote is astounding about 84% of people in poverty are women. I have not checked similar statistics in Canada but I will now that you raise it.
While there may not have been the outright purges in canadian unions of socialist and communist activists, I think there has been a defacto one. There seems to be little tolerance for the rhetoric from some of the more radical groups. But I do remember fondly my days in university listening to the speakers from the CPC and CPCML.
It has occurred to me in recent years that the more we progress along the liberal capitalist framework, the more the Marxist-Lennonist prediction of capitalism falling in upon itself rings true. Surely there appears to be signs of this especially in the US that is looking more and more like a third world country.
Anyway, thank you for sharing your insights with me. I have learned a great deal already from this short interchange.
Jacqueline S. Homan said:Well Blaine, the US has had a much more severe problem with classism than you guys to the north. It is the entire notion of the "undeserving" poor that has blocked socialized medicine from coming to fruition here. And as I said before, classism has two daughters: sexism and racism. The US middle class is decidedly much more classist and cruel to its poor overall in general than Canada. But since I am a woman that has had to struggle in deep poverty for nearly all my life within the US without any opportunity to leave and emigrate elsewhere, or even do any traveling, I can only speak from my reality: the reality suffered by the poor here in my country. And here in the US, poverty definitely has a female face: 84% of those living below poverty are women.
Secondly, I don't know about where you're at, but here in the states the witch hunts against Communists and socialists was relentless and terribly repressive. It was the purges of Communists and socialists from most union locals here in the states that transformed our unions into well-trained domesticated pets of the capitalist class.
Blaine Donais said:Thank you for this Jacqueline... you have given me much food for thought.
I have a couple of comments and queries regarding your very thorough and enlightening response.
First, let me explain that I feel very lucky as a Canadian growing up in the 1960's and 1970's. My father died just before I was born leaving my mother to raise seven children. I was the youngest. I recall eating lard sandwiches as a child and rarely having enough to eat. I was part of the socially derided "class" because of our poverty. My mother, with her grade 8 education, found a job as a cook in a hospital. But with so many mouths to feed and kids to take care of there was never enough to go around.
But I definitely had advantages that it appears many poor people in the US did not have. First, I grew up in a post-socialist state (Saskatchewan). Health care was free and we had floride in our water. I still have my own teeth. Also education was free and post secondary education was very cheap. I was able to get student loans and work throughout the school term in university to get a good education.
By the time I got to law school in the very early 1990's, the demographics were quite mixed - over 50% female and a large representation of people of color (mostly First Nations) - higher than the demographics of the city that I went to law school in - Saskatoon.
To be sure there were those who complained about "affirmative action" - but most of the labour leaders I had ever talked to in Canada were fairly progressive. I think you are right though that they do not often represent the views of their own membership on alot of equity issues.
If I get the gist of your point correctly, you are answering my question about perceptions of privilege associated with being unionized by saying that that is because unionized employees do belong to a privileged class.
I can certainly buy that for large numbers of unionized employees I have met. But some of the other assumptions give me a bit more difficulty.
First, the equation of unionization with male privilege: some of Canada's largest unions have a higher percentage of female members than male members. This includes the Teachers unions, Nurses Unions and (I think I have this right) Canada's biggest union the Canadian Union of Public Employees. I can definitely see the connection with male privilege and the manufacturing unions. But these are dwindling rapidly in Canada.
Second, the equation of unionization with white privilege: I am not sure how this plays itself out statistically in many Canadian unions. I do know that unions like HERE (Hotel Employees Restaurant Employees) and UFCW in Canada have a very large component of non-white workers. This does not surprise me given that the service industry is predominantly marginalized and therefore would be overrepresented by marginalized groups.
I am not sure if there is a difference associated with the national distinction (Canada vs US) or if I am just looking at this from rose colored glasses. But I thank you for offering me your viewpoint on this. It gives me much to think about in terms of the roles of unions in our society - the roles they have and the roles they ought to play.
Cheers
Blaine -
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Permalink Reply by Jacqueline S. Homan on
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"Thank you for this Jacqueline... you have given me much food for thought."
You're welcome. That's my job as an author and social justice activist for the poor.
"Also education was free and post secondary education was very cheap. I was able to get student loans and work throughout the school term in university to get a good education.
By the time I got to law school in the very early 1990's, the demographics were quite mixed - over 50% female and a large representation of people of color (mostly First Nations) - higher than the demographics of the city that I went to law school in - Saskatoon."
Here in the US, only 7% of those of us from deep poverty (the underclass) get to go to college. Fewer get to go to grad school, or law school or med school.
College, even a state university, is financially out of reach for the poor here now. I have a four year degree in mathematics from Kutztown University of Pennsylvania. I have over $50,000 (USD) in student loan debt as a result of high interest rates on student loans and unaffordable tuition prices.
Had I not been born into generational poverty and had some resources built into my life, I too could have been a lawyer. And I would not still be poor today. I would be an international human rights lawyer going after war criminals like Hashim Thaci, Alija Izetbegovic, George Bush and Dick Cheney. But with tuition for even a cheap law school being around $130,000, getting to become a lawyer was as far out of reach for me as a day trip to Sedna; as it would be for anyone here in very deep poverty.
I am unique as that I am the only author (that I'm aware of) from America's underclass who has written on poverty from the perspective of the very abstract issue of classism — the elephant in the living room that everyone else pretends not to see.
The "ghettoization" of women and minorities into lower-paying, lesser-valued service occupations causes women to be a lot poorer than men, even if there is (weak and ineffectual) union representation present in those occupations.
There is also the issue of fairness: just because someone is female that does not mean they should be denied the opportunity to become a pilot, an engineer, or an electrician if that's where their interests and talents lie. Just because someone is female, that doesn't automatically mean they would make a good waitress, secretary, nurse, or teacher.
In a society where one's life chances are severely limited based on pronouncement at birth "it's a girl!" in the lowest socio-economic rungs, such a society cannot claim to be "free" nor "democratic."
Here in the US, the only "job opportunities" that pay enough to afford decent housing, life-sustaining utilities, enough food, and some occasional medical care that are available to very, very poor women from generational poverty in the Underclass are strip dancing and prostitution.
The petit bourgeoisie feminist movement opened doors for women from the middle and upper classes to go to law school and med school. But the realities facing women in deep poverty without hope and without any chances for decent lives at all are far different. Ignoring that not only invalidates our suffering and dismisses the injustice of job discrimination against women, it promotes classism and economic injustice against the poorest and most marginalized people.
Imagine how you would feel if your only means of survival available to you entailed having to dance naked for leering, cruel and disgusting men who didn't even see you as a human being with needs and feelings that matter — while those who are far better off than you are and ever will be on the socio-economic ladder tell you that if you're not getting any decent opportunities it's your own damn fault.
Imagine how you would feel about having to trade sexual favors with your landlord who is a disgusting bastard that is old enough to be your grandfather just so you (my sister) and your orphaned kid sister (me) aren't evicted because your sub-poverty, no health benefit waitress job isn't enough to afford the $10/month rent increase for your roach-infested ghetto apartment in a neighborhood rife with drive-by shootings.
That was my life. That was my older sister's life, too — prior to her death at age 40 of stage four ovarian cancer three weeks before I graduated from college at the age of 34 back in 2001; the very first in my family to graduate from high school and college. And that was also the life of countless other women and girls in poverty in the US that nobody gives a damn about, or even acknowledges in this "land of opportunity."
I am the only one from my old neighborhood that lived to see age 40, that never had an unwanted pregnancy, an STD, a drug addiction, or a criminal arrest. What I have survived was grueling at best. And because I have an education, I am morally obligated to use it via the power of the pen to speak not only for myself but also for the tens of millions of others in deep poverty here that have no voice whom progressive organizations have conveniently ignored for the better part of the last three decades.
According to our latest census, women with a Bachelors degree (4 year college degree) make less money than men with only a high school diploma or less. And a college education costs a lot of money, much more here than in Canada and elsewhere. For that, we can credit the brilliant commandeering of our universities and organized labor groups by the corporate klepto-plutocracy.
Whatever else one says about the erstwhile communist nations, they achieved what capitalism cannot and has no intention of ever accomplishing for everyone: adequate nutritious food, housing, clothing for all, economic security in old age, free medical care, free education at all levels, and the guaranteed right to a job — in countries that were never as rich as ours.
Unions here have failed to address sexism and sexist employment practices, turning a lot of dispossessed and marginalized people off to them here in the US. Job discrimination against women and the devaluation of "women's jobs" is not a position that unions should be defending as agents of socio-economic justice and as progressive institutions.
Now let me tell you why that is important — besides the obvious aforementioned reasons.
In the US, we are in the death throes of what was almost a democracy. We didn't quite get there. If we had, we would have grown up and become France. In France, when the poor (who have it much better than our working class here) were treated as shabbily as we are, the French citizens militantly shut the whole damn country down. President Sarkozy doesn't own the streets of Paris. The people do. Contrast that to the US where people obediently beg for crumbs from their corporate overlords and their corporate-owned politicians in Congress and call that "freedom."
The problems here threaten to spill over and undermine what gains unions made in our neighbors to the north. So this is not just "our problem" here in the states where the poor have absolutely NO safety net; it is soon going to be a Canadian problem as well.
Chris Hedges, a columnist and retired reporter, ascribes this to the abysmal failure of what he calls "the liberal class" to stand its ground firmly against abusive social and economic policies that serve to benefit the capitalist class at the expense of workers, consumers, the marginalized and the jobless. The liberal class encompasses institutions that had been the traditional agents for social change and economic reform: unions, chiefly among all others.
The bifurcation of the liberal class from its core ideology that led to the liberal class becoming an apologist for the expansion of repression, cruelty, and exploitation has been in the making for the last 30-40 years here in the US. They made a deal with the devil on the devil's terms thinking they could eventually prevail through pragmatism, and this alienated them from their core allies — Communists, Socialists, women's rights groups, etc. — because we saw that nothing was really gained. Every compromise upon compromise chipped away at what few social and economic reforms that the liberal class could previously claim credit for.
Societies that cannot, or will not, regulate capitalist forces collapse and cannibalize themselves. That's what's already happening here. Mainstream media, once the watchdog for democracy, has morphed into the lapdog for the capitalist class.
With the failure of the liberal class to abate discrimination and restrain capitalism's abuses and capitalists' hijacking of democratic governmental processes comes a void. And that void won't be filled by educated progressive demagogues agitating for social justice; rather it is being filled by authoritarian apocalyptic demagogues like Glenn Beck and Robert Rector of the right-wing fundamentalist Christian Heritage Foundation who denounces President Obama as "Hitler" and calls for the scrapping of the US Constitution and replacing it with Mosaic Law.
Traditionally, there should have been members of the liberal class — whether in the press, in organized labor, or academia — who stood fast and firm on the core values of social equality, including aggressive abolishment of job discrimination against women in ALL arenas; and maintaining an adequate social safety net for the poor, the disabled, and the elderly. But they didn't.
That is the reason why the anti-war movement here failed. The kids who are in Iraq and Afghanistan come from families on the lowest economic rungs that were betrayed by the liberal class who danced in the streets pleased with themselves over "racial progress" of the 2008 presidential election that allowed a wealthy, Harvard-educated "black" man to commit the highest crimes at the behest of the corporate class that previously only rich white men were allowed to commit, and calling that "spreading democracy." It's no secret that we have a draft by socio-economic proxy and that no one cares as long as it's only poor youth from ghettos and trailer parks getting blown up in imperialist wars in which they're sent to kill other poor and disenfranchised people in foreign lands.
Most of the publicly accepted treatises on poverty and economic justice here are written by those with right-wing leanings from the middle and upper classes who have PhD's from Ivy League schools like Princeton, Harvard, or Yale. So they are viewing poverty through lenses tinted with a lot of class bias — like two cretins who recently resurrected the "culture of poverty" claptrap, which is nothing more than blaming the victim for the consequences of economic problems that were not of their making.
I had to self-publish my work, Classism For Dimwits, because NO mainstream publisher in the states wanted to touch that hot potato — at least, not as of three years ago when I wrote it. That's why most people don't even know about it. Being poor, I don't have the economic backing to get it into every brick-and-mortar bookstore and get an advance as I would if a corporate trade name publishing firm were backing me and publishing my works. So the only places that carry my books are Amazon.com and Barnes & Noble's online bookstore.
The censorship of leftist books, especially books written by poor people agitating for social justice, is nothing new here. Many of our more prominent leftist scholars and academicians here have been professionally alienated, blacklisted, threatened, harassed by the FBI and other components of the national security state, murdered, and placed on "no fly" lists.
Democracy is like having sex — it's not a spectator sport. -
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Permalink Reply by Jacqueline S. Homan on
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Are they working within the capitalist paradigm with no intention of moving towards a socialist one on the international level (remember, capital is global) in which everyone is given the guaranteed right to a job or the wage equivalent in a minimum guaranteed income support check (plus access to decent medical care) if they've been completely economically excluded and are jobless?
It is, in my opinion, about half a century too little too late to now talk of erasing the gender division of labor in order to restrain capitalism when this should have been done 80 years ago. It's great that they're talking about it now, but it's a whole lot too little, a whole lot too late IMHO.
I don't see how any organization that is ignoring/failing to do something for those who are already in the permanent underclass — those who have been without a job and any income at all for five years or longer, and who have been rendered permanently unemployable due to capitalism and its inherent tendency of blaming the long-term jobless poor for their own plight — can really be part of the solution. I see them as complicit, albeit to a lesser degree, because they're still supporting the capitalist paradigm by only looking to help some while ignoring others who are typically those in the most dire need of relief, rather than addressing the problems of those at the very bottom who are always forgotten and left out entirely. Only a socialist paradigm can do that. But under socialism, unions as we know them in their present form would no longer be needed.
This is why I see no solution other than tackling the injustices of poverty caused by classism by scrapping capitalism entirely and replacing it with socialism, and it must be done in the global theater. When I wrote Classism For Dimwits three years ago, I was not ready to fully embrace the idea that socialism is really the only solution, but what I have seen and experienced since then has led me to conclude now that Leon Trotsky was right.
Richard Duranceau said:Hi Jacqueline,
I have just been following this thread and paid particular attention to what you have been saying about labour unions. Certainly unions that have been focused on traditional bread and butter bargaining issues have had problems. How about unions that have taken a broader social view of their role in society? Do you see any hope there or these unions just as complicit?
Thanks,
Richard -
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Permalink Reply by Jacqueline S. Homan on
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Richard,
I would like to add that what is happening in the US is a real mess. In fact, "real mess" would be an understatement. Sinclair Lewis once prophetically intoned, "When fascism comes to America, it will be draped in the flag and carrying the cross."
Anyone here following the scuttlebutt surrounding the ultra-right wing lunatic fringe politicians like Rand Paul (who wants to repeal the Civil Rights laws and abolish the minimum wage and social security/Medicare), Sarah Palin (who vowed to declare war on any other country that God commands her to), and Sharron Angle (who said that a 13 yr old incest/rape victim who gets pregnant from rape should be forced to bear her rapist's baby) can see that Sinclair Lewis was right.
And owing to the rest of the world's hatred for Americans (they all think all Americans have it made and are greedy pigs), without thinking about the Americans in deep poverty who had/have no control over all the screwed up crap that our government pulls abroad (hell, we don't even have any control over what it pulls here on us!), it's fair to say no other country is going to open its arms and welcome impoverished Americans who are left-wing dissidents who are economic as well as political refugees and who will probably be the first targeted by our increasingly fascist government for extermination.
Richard Duranceau said:Jacqueline,
You touched on an issue that I have been struggling with for awhile. I live in Canada and I have voted for the New Democratic Party (NDP) which has been a social democratic party but has now drifted to the right. Also, combined with the events of the economic crisis and subsequent austerity measures being put into place around the globe, I have been forced to re-evaluate my beliefs. I was a strong social democrat that believed that one could work with the market but I have pretty well have come to the same conclusions that you have.
As for the unions, I have been heavily involved in my union but believe that it is not well suited to the current environment even in Canada. It is essentially a business union (white collar) and I have tried to work to change things on the inside but have come to the conclusion that change can only come from the bottom up from the membership and in collaboration with non-unionised workers to avoid what is happening in the United States. To the extent that unions do not address the broader issues that you outlined, they will be condemned to irrelevance in the long-term. -
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